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Ol)e Stor^ of 
(ri)err^ Valley 




BY HENRY U. SWINNERTON, Ph. D.. 
CHERRY VALLEY, N. Y. 



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THE STORY 



OF 



CHERRY VALLEY 



BY 



HENRY U. SWINNERTON, Ph. D, 



CHERRY VALLEY, N. Y. 



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GIFT 

MH& WOOD ROW WILSON 
NOV. 25, 1939 



THE STORY OF CHERRY VALLEY 

By Henry U. Swinnerton, Ph. D., Cherry Valley, N. Y. 

Two years ago there was placed in the Presbyterian Church at 
Cherry Valley a mural tablet, whose inscription recalls the story 
which I am to relate to you in the briefest form. It reads: 

A. D. 1741 

Rev. Samuel Dunlop A. B. 

a native of Ulster, Ireland, 

led hither the families who founded 

THIS CHURCH 

He here preached God's peace 

and taught Liberal Learning 

Thirty-seven years 

His "Work ended in scenes of Blood 

His Home desolated, He died in Exile, 

near Albany. 

cir. 1780. 

His Wife 

Elizabeth (Gallt) Dunlop, 

born in Coleraine, 

their daughter Mary Wells, her Husband, 

and children, save one, 

were cruelly slain in the 

MASSACRE 
which scattered the flock 
Nov. 11, 1778. 

A short distance from the present church is the ancient cemetery, 
a scant quarter acre, crowded full of Revolutionary memorials. In 
it stood the church of that day, a handsome structure then newly 
built, and about it extended the palisade fort, bastioned for can- 
non at opposite angles. Within the small area lie the graves of 
four Revolutionary colonels and upwards of a dozen others, officers 



THE STORY OP CHERRY VALLEY 

and privates and civilian officials, who fought or served in that 
war ; besides quite a multitude of those who suffered death or cap- 
tivity, or narrowly escaped it with loss of everything at that ter- 
rible time. Around, rough slabs of rock mark the graves of the 
pioneers who died in the early day when there was no chisel to cut 
their epitaphs ; among them that of John Wells, cultured gentleman 
and officer in the French War, and lay judge on the bench at Johns- 
town. Within view of the cemetery all around, are homesteads, 
each the center of some tale or tradition of the savage event, and 
by it passes the earliest thoroughfare trodden by men's feet on this 
frontier. The place lies on the northernmost terrace of the Catskill 
highland, twelve miles south of the Mohawk River, 1,400 feet above 
tide. 

From immemorial time a wilderness route had been known to 
the Indians from the Mohawk at Canajoharie to the head of the 
Susquehanna, down which stream they passed on war or hunt, to 
Pennsylvania and the Chesapeake and beyond. From this prima- 
tive highway trails led northward up the Unadilla and the Che- 
nango to the heart of the country of the Oneidas and Onondagas ; 
and further west by the Chemung to the hunting grounds and 
lakes, the villages and "castles" of the Cayugas and Senecas, or 
Senekees. Early discovering this track, Dutch fur traders found 
their way to the gathering place for barter, Oghwaga, at the carry 
across the Great Bend, the largest village on this path. This spot, 
near Windsor, is important to be noted^ as a center of primative 
trade, of early travel, of missionary effort of war. The name sur- 
vives in the hamlet of Onoquago, and Tuscarora, across the stream 
/^ in the site of the village assigned by the Iroquois to a band of that 
adopted tribe. No white inhabitant had an abode in all 
this solitude. Eastward and northward a few German 
exiles from the Palatinate of the Rhine had begun to 
settle thinly in the Schoharie Valley, and a little beyond Canajo- 
harie on the Mohawk. In a beautiful depression on this old trail, 
beyond the rugged ascent to the watershed, and at the spot where 
the red men launched their canoes in the farthest streams of the 
Susquehanna, a patent of 8,000 acres was, in 1738, secured by three 
leading men of Albany, Lendert Gansevoort, Jacob Roseboom and 

MRS. WOODROW WILSON 
NOV. 25, 1939 



THE STOKY OF CIIEKKY VALLEY 



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Sybrant Van Schaick, and assigned the following year to their 
associate, John Lindsay, a Scotchman of enterprise, who brought 
his family and built a habitation in 1739. After events gave the 
site, a beautiful knoll, a double interest, when it became the blood- 
iest scene of the massacre. They were narrowly saved from per- 
ishing with hunger in the bitter winter ensuing by the succor of an 
Indian on snowshoes with food from the river. 

In New York Lindsay had enlisted the efforts of a young clergy- 
man, traveling through the colonies, Rev. Samuel Dunlop, through 
whom were secured a few Presbyterian families from Londonderry, 
Ireland, who seeking freedom and prospects of greater promise, 
about 1720, had emigrated to Boston and had founded a new Lon- 
donderry in New Hampshire. Finding conditions still unfriendly 
even in New England, James Campbell, David Ramsay, John Dick- 
son and John Gallt, with their families, in 1741, came to the spot, 
making the voyage around Cape Cod to New York and up the Hud- 
son by sloop ; slowly tacking for two weeks, it is said, on the river. 

The sloops sailed under Captain Pruyn, a cousin of the owner, 
who anxiously awaited its arrival at the wharf, in whose family 
tradition has preserved the story. The provision of food had been 
spent, and the voyagers needed immediate aid, which w^as cordially 
afforded them. The merchants of Albany appreciated the value of 
the establishment of a settlement fjDr out on the Susquehanna trail. 
The ancient ledger^of Hendry ck Mynden^t Roseboom, fur dealer and 
importer of European merchandise, and his sons, still preserved, 
show the profitable trade of long years with the people of Cherry 
Valley, which marked his enlightened liberality in lending them aid 
when he learned of their exhausted condition, and in furnishing 
them supplies and tools for their arduous venture. 

Hendryck established his son John at Schenectady to be nearer 
the Indians, while another son, Myndert, remained at Albany, the 
character of the traffic even down to the advent of the war appears 
from the entries in their books. For example: "Myndert Rose- 
boom in Albany" indebted, Nov. 1774, with an invoice amounting 
to £210.17.2., enumerating "1361 lbs. of rSl leather at 2s. 9d per 
lb., 33 of parchment, 16 otters, 1 fisher, 14 mush rats, 13 gray 
skins, 9 b^artskins, 5 beavers, etc." The comprising extent of the 



THE STORY OF CHERRY VALLEY 

trade in articles of silver will appear from a few of the entries ; for 

John called himself a "silversmith." Messrs Abm. Van Eppes & 

1 Jacob Van Epes ; 5 arm bands, 3 round moons, 4 pare rist bands, 1 

I box, 50 pare eare rings, 13 pare large, 100 broaches, 50 do. small 

'' 1 — 21.18.0. In Apr. 1773 Gorset Teller & WilliS Groesbeck pur- 

chase -eaeh jewelr^y — "eare wheels, large crosses, half-moons, h^re 

I plaits, (perhaps like what the Dutch peasant girls wear) — "and 

j 1000 gun flinlg/' to the amount of / 115.9.0. [ frr/'^i ^l^t^J , 

The place had been called Lindsay's Bush, but Mr. Dunlap, writing 

to his friends, proposed to date his Idtter from Cherry Valley, from 

the wild cherry growth everywhere about. On leaving Ireland he 

had promised Elizabeth Gallt that he would claim her within seven 

years or leave her free. Having been absent nearly that time, he 

now returned. Storms delayed the ship off the wild coast, and he 

arrived just as the date was expiring, and only in time to snatch 

his bride from a marriage to another. It was a faithful union of 

long years, to be broken by a tragical end. 

Some additional settlers returned with them, but for years the 
place remained feeble, until the Revolution, the last point of de- 
parture and supply for those setting out or returning from the 
wilderness. The agents of Sir William Johnson 's important traffic 
with the natives passed to and from Oghwaga through the place; 

j bodies of Palatine Germans took the Susquehanna route to settle its 

I lower valley and become the fathers of the Pennsylvania Dutch; 

I and, later, claimants from Connecticut followed, to settle Wyoming 
and withstand Indian massacre and the Pennamite wars with the 
partisans of William Penn. Lindsay soon left Cherry Valley and 
his farm was taken by John Wells, who became a man of influence, 
and in process of time his son Robert wedded Mr. Dunlop's daugh- 
ter Mary. Their neighbor was James Willson, who had surveyed 
the patent and who had been high sheriff of Albany County. His 
son seems to have married a second of the daughters, named Elea- 
nor. As early as 1748 missionaries under the influence of Jona- 
than Edwards at Northampton and Rev. Eleazer Wheelock, who 
founded a school for Indian youth at Lebanon, Conn., the school in 
which the able Indian leader, Joseph Brant, received a civilized edu- 
cation, established themselves at Oghwaga and other spots, leading 



THE STORY OF CHERRY VALLEY 

to intercourse with a class of men passing to and fro superior to the 
usual wayfarer of the wilds, such as John Sergeant and David Brain- 
erd, Elihu Spencer, Samuel Kirkland and the able Gideon Hawley. 
Among the unmarked graves in the old cemetery must be that of a 
young Delaware Indian, pious, educated with Joseph Brant at Leb- 
anon, Joseph Wooley, a preacher, teacher and apostle to his people, 
who died at Cherry Valley on one of his journeys to the Susquehanna. 
Mr. Dunlop, being a university man, gathered a few puplis very early 
whom he taught the classics, following the plow, or in the rude log 
church and school house reared near the Wells residence. It was 
the first beginnings of liberal education, as his church was the> 
earliest seat of worship in English west of Albany and the Hudson. 
Major John Frey,and others prominent in the Revolution, were here 
educated. All the region southwest of Canajoharie was vaguely known 
as Cherry Valley, ]:ts lake, Otsego, was the Cherry Valley Lake, and 
the narrow Indian path was gradually subdued and widened into 
a rugged wagon road, the Cherry Valley road. It followed Bow- 
man's Creek and up the steep of Teckaharawa. Long the little 
community remained remote and lonely, an outpost of civilization 
on the southwest verge of the Mohawk's country, with whom and the 
Oneidas ; next west, the most cordial relations were maintained, and 
for Mr. Dunlop especially the Indians conceived high regard and 
veneration. 

After the first twenty years the immigrants became more num- 
erous, leading to a new issue ; scattered settlements began thinly to 
push out west, southwest and south. At Springfield and on Otsego 
Lake, on the Butternut Creek and the Unadilla and Charlotte 
Rivers, and all along the upper Susquehanna, little clearings began 
to forewarn the Indians that the irresistible white man was slowly 
occupying his forests. Every settler was a hunter, scouring the 
woods for game, slaughtering the pigeon roosts and sweeping the 
streams of their fish. The Germans were pushing up the Mohawk ; 
by 1750 and '60 beyond the Falls Hill (Little Falls), a strong com- 
munity had been gathered about the German Flatts, and a string 
of forts traced a road of growing travel right through the territory 
of the Oneidas to the lakes. The land of the Mohawks, eastward, 
had been reduced to scattered patches interspersed among the hold- 



THE STORY OF CHERRY VALLEY 



ings and great patents of the whites. The savage freely sold or 
gave his land, but awoke later to see that his home and his haunts 
were gone, and his means of subsistence were too slender to be 
shared with all these new comers. The intelligent young chief of 
the tribe, Tha-yen-da-na-gue, by bis English name Joseph Brant, en- 
joyed the entire confidence of Sir William Johnson, co-operating 
in his enlightened plans and policy in the management of Indian 
affairs and by procuring them civilized advantages endeavoring 
to make up to his people what they lost by these changes. In visit- 
ing England in the interests of the claims made by the Indians, 
where the most flattering attentions were shown him by the court 
and the great officials of the government in London, it came about 
inevitably that he contracted ties and gained a point of view which 
naturally made him their ally in any changes which were later to 



arise. 



To stay the discontent of the Indians and fix a limit beyond 
which the inroads of the settlers should cease, was the object of 
the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768. Three thousand Indians 
gathered with their chiefs to meet Sir William Johnson, the King's 
Indian Superintendent, and it was covenanted that the white man 
should not go west of the Unadilla. That river and a line extended 
south to the Delaware (coinciding with the present western bound- 
ary of Delaware and Otsego Counties) should be the limit of all 
further advance of the despoiling settlers. This Indian line was a 
continental affair; of imperial extent it shut out civilization from 
the whole Great Lake region, including the western part of New 
York and the adjoining part of Pennsylvania and the entire north- 
west territory to the Ohio River. It passed down the Susquehanna and 
by the Towanda Creek to the Alleghany. The last parcel of ground 
on the Susquehanna was taken up at the mouth of the Unadilla 
in 1770 by a friend of Mr. Dunlop 's. Rev. William Johnston, with 
a colony of his Scotch-Irish compatriots from Duanesburg, driven 
first from Worcester, Mass., by Congregational intolerance, to New 
Hampshire, and thence to Schenectady. Johnston's ordination 
they declared "disorderly" and burnt his church. But as that 
cause of Indian unrest promised settlement, grave disputes were 
rising among the whites themselves, the colonies against England, 



THE STORY OF CHERRY VALLEY 



disputes about stamped paper and ancient rights and taxation with- 
out representation— matters that were utterly beyond the Indians' 
comprehension. They had been skillfully bound by Sir William 
in attachment to the Kin^; their powder and ball, their blankets 
and hatchets, their gratuities of food against the bitter winter 
starvation, all came from the good King ; and they were bewildered 
as they now saw a deepening revolt and hatred against this benefi- 
cent friend ; the militiaman or rifle ranger carving on his powder 
horn the rude couplet, beneath some ruder caricature of Britian's 
monarch, 

I, powder, and my brother, ball, 

Foemen are to tyrants all. 
But the (juarrel grew, and the Indian could not fail to be 
involved in it. Hope of aid from him induced the Tories to tamper 
with his love of blood and plunder; the King's ministers even 
offered bounties for the scalps of rebels, $20.00 for a baby's scalp. 
Dread of him led the Colonials to cross measures; to coax him to 
take their side, to persuade him to stand aloof, yet to send one and 
another threatening expedition into his country prepared to treat 
with Brant, or capture him, burn his villages, destroy his crops of 
corn, beans and pumpkins, and cut down his apple trees. The 
Mohawks, after the battles of Concord and Lexington in 1775, were 
led to retire in a body to Canada, the exciting news of the Patriots ' 
resistance being so made use of by Colonel Guy Johnson that the 
whole tribe regarded war as upon them. They left their memorial 
in the name of the river, but it was an exile from w^hich they were 
never to return. Indians were here and there shot or captured, 
and not seldom scalped ; Tim. Murphy boasted his record of forty 
Indians killed by his one hand. Finally the large military opera- 
tions connected with the campaign against Burgoyne threw the 
savages over to the side of the King in hot anger and revenge. If 
a people do not take up war until passion is roused, this ingredient 
was now furnished. The story of St. Leger's expedition to the 
Mohawk Valley from Oswego, the attempt on Fort Schuyler and 
the bloody ambuscade at Oriskany, is too long to be introduced 
here ; but the awful slaughter inflicted on the Indians at Oriskany, 
especially the Senekees, while themselves inflicting an equal carnage 



THE STORY OF CHERRY VALLEY 

upon the Provincials, sent them howling back to their villages 
and vowing desperate revenge for the loss of a hundred of their 
braves, and particularly against Cherry Valley, for when Herkimer 
was felled and Colonel Cox and many other officers slain at the 
outset, it was Colonel Campbell and Major Clyde, both Cherry Val- 
ley men, who directed the stubborn continuance of the fight and 
brought off the remnant of the force, retreating but substantially 
victorious. 

That was in 1777. Burgoyne's grand scheme failed; invasion 
was averted from the rich grain lands of the Mohawk, and there 
seemed hope for the inhabitants of the frontier, where the Oneidas, 
at least, under the guidance of their missionary adviser, Mr. Kirk- 
land, seemed not disposed to be unfriendly to the patriotic cause. 

But the British in New Jersey had found Washington hard to 
handle, and in hope of weakening him Brant, the Butlers and other 
Royalist leaders on the border were directed to spread such alarm 
and create such distress and devastation as to draw away detach- 
ments for its relief. A regiment under Colonel Ickabod Alden, 
the Sixth Masschusetts, made up in part of friends of the Cherry 
Valley people, but most inefficiently commanded, was at Albany, 
and in May started on its way to garrison the frontier posts. 
Schoharie was barely saved by the arrival of help in July; at 
Cobleskill, earlier, occurred a fight and defeat by Brant, in which 
Captain Patrick was killed, and German Flatts so late as Septem- 
ber 17th was burnt, and yet before any aid reached it ; so tardy was 
the action of Alden, as well as of the local military. The main body 
of the regiment, 230 strong, with the lieutenant colonel, destined for 
CherryjValley, only arrived July 24th, the colonel himself only on the 
30th. Springfield had been burnt June 18th, and a swarm of fleeing 
refugees from every quarter had brought the news of the shocking 
slaughter, on July 3rd, at Wyoming, and well-founded rumors of 
what was being planned against their own settlement. On remote 
farms the rapid-moving chief appeared, requiring every man to 
declare for the King or flee with wife and little ones. The hope 
of Brant would seem to have been, while guiding his tribes in a war 
in aid of the royal cause, to keep their savage impulses in check. 
Thus he burnt Springfield, but first gathered the women and chil- 



THE STORY OP CHERRY VALLEY. 

dren into a house to be saved. He burnt German Flatts, but the 
people had already taken refuire in the forts on the river. Against 
Cherry Valley in particular he must have been reluctant to move, 
for the people were his personal friends. Jonn Wells had beon thf» 
respected associate of Sir William Johnson in public affairs at 
Johnstown, both, it is true, now dead, but the families still intimate. 
In the trench war Wells had built a fort at Ognwaga for tht> 
Indians, and he and Colonel Campbell had served as officers under 
Johnson at Fort Edward. Mr. Dunlop had been in happier times 
an adviser and sharer with Brant in the missionary and civilizing 
projects which he had promoted. Colonel Clyde and his appren- 
lice with Mr. Kirkland, about the year 1770, had erected a church 
lor the Oneidas at their castle, an enterprise such as Brant assisted 
with warm approval and by raising money. Brant was a frequent 
visitor and old acquaintance of Mrs. Clyde's, who as Catherine 
Wasson, at Schenectady, had been the friend and playmate of the 
beautiful Lady of Johnson Hall, his sister, Mollie Brant. Even a 
man like Colonel John Butler, who commanded at Wyoming, said 
afterwards that he would have gone on his hands and knees to save 
the Wells family. 

But society was cloven asunder, and in the unscrupulous AV alter 
Butler, his son, and his crew of Tories, Brant was fated to co- 
operate with men that put all humane considerations at defiance. 
The spirit of the Indians was hard to control ; his own 
Mohawks felt that their lands were gone forever; and the Tories, 
a bad lot generally, included every low renegade and every unmiti- 
gated brute on the border. The strife degenerated to utter 
butchery, and Brant must bear the odium. An incentive to rapine 
with such men, not often noticed, was the prospect of ransom for 
captives, women and children, and the sale of such slaves as could 
be raided away. Mention is made in the list ol captives of "Mr. 
Dunlop 's negro wench" and other slaves, who were carried off, 
even when white captives were set free; and of these latter the 
families of men of importance were likely to be retained as prison- 
ers in order to keep their husbands and fathers busy and anxious 
for their recovery, and so cripple their activity in the war.' 

It was a summer of terror. The large buildings of Colonel 



THE STORY OP CHERRY VALLEY 

Campbell had been stockaded early in the year. General Lafayette 
at Johnstown advised the erection of a large fortification round the 
grave yard and commodious church. Early in June the people 
moved in here, with the fugitives from Springfield and nearby 
places, together with those from Unadilla under Rev. Mr. Johnston, 
who was made chaplain of the garrison, while his sons enlisted or 
scouted. All along urgent appeals and efforts had been made to 
secure defenders, with little success. Of 600 militia summoned at 
Canajoharie only 200 responded. At Cherry Valley there were 
only 80 armed men in July, owing to the demands of the harvest 
and for the soldiers elsewhere. June 5 Clyde reports to General 
Stark, ' ' from 6-700 cattle feeding within a circle of % of a mile, 
and not over 30 men that would stand their ground if attacked." 
He pleads for assistance to save these large supplies from being 
"lost to freedom." Yet Brant, spying from the over 
looking Lady Hill, refrained from an attempt to sur- 
prise it with a small force he had, by mistaking a 
train of children playing soldier with sticks on the green 
before Colonel Campbell's house, for a body of troops. It, 
was in seeking to waylay a messenger who might explain this 
mysterious force that his own valued friend, Lieutenant Wormuth, 
or Wormwood, of Palatine, on his return from announcing the 
actual approach of a few militiamen under Colonel Ford, was shot 
at "Wormwood rock" in the ravine of Teckaharawa. The rock is 
still pointed out, called Brant's Rock, from behind which the 
Indian who was with him rashly and against his orders shot down 
his boyhood neighbor as he rode by on his horse, his orderly making 
his escape to carry the news of the tragedy to the friends of both 
men; for Brant's ancestral home was at Canajoharie. 

Cherry Valley in the forty years since its settlement had grown 
to be a place of some sixty families, including some exceptionally 
intelligent and prominent persons. Judge John Wells had died, 
but Mr. Dunlop was still living, and the Wells homestead was occu- 
pied by the large family of Robert Wells. Captain Robert Mc- 
Kean, an intrepid Indian fighter, was active with a body of rangers 
scouting everywhere, gathering information and watching the 
movements of the foe. The important family of the Harpers had 



THE STORY OF CHERRY VALLEY. 

lately moved to the Charlotte Valley, but operated their mill at the 
Beaver Dam to furnish lumber for completing the redouts. Colo- 
nel Campbell we have seen at the Battle of Oriskany; and among 
those most to be relied upon was Samuel Clyde, a veteran of the 
earlier wars; bred a ship carpenter, he had built naval docks at 
Halifax and batteaux for the expedition to Ticonderoga, and had 
fought at Frontenac. At Schenectady he had married his brave 
wife, a woman of superior mind, a niece of Matthew Thornton, the 
patriot leader of New Hampshire and signer of the Declaration of 

Independence. 

The emphatic choice of the Patriot cause by the people of Cherry 
Valley had been publicly declared as early as 1775. A liberty 
meeting was held in the church to express sympathy with the people 
of Boston, and to ratify the acts of the Continental Congress. 
They denounced the attempts of the Tories at Johnstown through 
the Grand Jury to commit Tryon County to the Royalist cause. 
The strong Whig sentiments of the place, against the plans of the 
Johnsons and Colonel Butler's Highlanders, were voiced in iiery 
speeches from Thomas Spencer, an Indian interpreter of rude 
eloquence, and from Mr. John Moore, a man of ability and educa- 
tion Delegate from Tryon County in the Provincial Congress, but 
incapacitated for war service by a lameness. He with Campbell 
and Clyde were on the Committee of Safety for Palatine district, 
and two others, James Willson and Hugh Mitchell, served later on 
the Schenectady Committee. A letter from these earnest men to 
the Committee at Albany, imploring help to save the frontier, con- 
cludes as follows : " In a word, gentlemen, it is our fixed resolution 
to support and carry into execution everything recommended by the 
Continental Congress, and to be free or die." Yet their sobriety 
and firm religious principle are attested as well by a letter to the 
Palatine Committee objecting to a meeting needlessly called on a 
Sunday : "For unless the necessity of the committee sitting super- 
exceed the duties to be performed in attending the public worship 
of God, we think it ought to be put off till another day." 

Sir William Johnson had died in 1774. The truculent Toryism 
of Guy Johnson, his successor, aroused deep hostility, which led 
him either to feel or feign fear for his own safety. He declared 



THE STORY OF CHERRY VALLEY 

that he was in danger of capture by the " Bostonians, " and with 
the body of Mohawks retired, first to Fort Stanwix, and finally to 
Montreal. He here co-operated with Sir Guy Carlton in fomenting 
the hatred of the Cayugas and Senecas. From Canada round by 
the lakes and forests, and up the Susquehanna to Oghwaga and 
Unadilla, where Brant had his rendezvous in the rear of Cherry 
Valley, trickled mingling rivulets, red coats, green-clad riflemen 
and Canadian half-breeds, Tories and malcontents, and gathering 
bands of stealthy Indians, driving out all who would not declare 
for King George, and concentrating a force of 1,500 to 2,000 men. 
Along the flats of the streams, under British incitement, wide fields 
of corn and vegetables were planted for feeding them. 

Yet the summer passed away and no attempt had been made on 
Cherry Valley. Colonel Alden, an eastern man unused to Indian 
ways, could not realize the danger, notwithstanding the scenes 
going on around him, and the serious advice of citizens of experi- 
ence. "The depredations were from small bands; he would send 
out and arrest them." His theory was that savages would never 
stand against disciplined soldiers; besides, they had artillery, two 
swivel guns. The families in the fort were not allowed to remain ; 
instead, he quartered his officers in their houses, himself with his 
lieutenant colonel fixing his headquarters at that of Robert Wells, 
a quarter of a mile from the fort. There is marrying and giving 
in marriage, nevertheless, as well as eating and much drinking, in 
the midst of warlike alarms. Lieutenant McKendry in his Journal 
records, September 9, Captain McKean returned from a scout to 
Unadilla with two prisoners, and October 22 is present at the cap- 
tain's marriage to Mrs. Jenny Campbell. The day following he is 
at the wedding of Sergeant Elijah Dickerman and Letty Gibbons. 
"Drank 7 Galls, wine." Lieutenant Colonel Stacy and Captain 
Ballard have a horse race and Stacy wins the bet. Viewing some 
horses at John Campbell's he "drinks cyder," and "milk punch" 
at Mr. Ramsie's with Captain Parker; milk punch also at Alden 's 
headquarters "when Fort Alien- is named by Capt. Hickling." ^/Vif//, 
He goes "to Harmony Hall and drank some Grog," and goes to 
Harmony Hall again some days later, what for not said, but pre- 
sumably same refreshment. October 15 he "wet his appointment," 



THE STOKY OF CIIKRRY VALLEY. 

"wine 28 dollars," and Lieutenant William White wets his, "Wine 
Amt. 36 dollars." Surely our liberties were achieved not without 
mighty wrestling with the liquor interest. But they were all in it. 
The very first day of his arrival he records apparently a visit of 
courtesy upon a family friend of other days. "Went to Rev'd Mr. 
Dunlop's & drank sillabub while discoursing the old Gentleman 
about sundries affairs." 

Brant meanwhile ceases his activities not a moment. His design 
may perhaps have been by repeated alarms and threats to frighten 
his friends in the place into taking flight, and then to attack the 
stockade, a measure of legitimate war. But two things conspired to 
defeat such a design, if he entertained it; in the first place many 
of the people did flee, as did Mr. Dunlop, removing to Albany the 
best of his goods. But September and October passed, and winter 
beginning with November in that elevated climate, they came back, 
partly to care for their stock, partly thinking the danger was 
passed from the lateness of the season. So that when the blow 
came it was far more calamitous than the Indian leader expected 
it to be. In the second place, his own situation was affected by a 
blow dealt him from Schoharie under orders from the energetic 
Governor Clinton. There was a patriot Colonel Butler there, 
William, who with great speed crossed his regiment from the Scho- 
harie through the forest to the Delaware, and thence down the 
Owleout to the Susquehanna, and on a rapid sweep uprooted both 
Unadilla and Oghwaga ; a stroke which had it been accomplished 
earlier might have saved the whole frontier. Brant gave up the 
contest for the season and was on his way to Niagara to winter, but 
at Tioga Point he met Walter Butler with his motley force wild 
with the project of an attack on Cherry Valley. Brant was reluc- 
tant to return, reluctant to serve under Butler, whom he despised. 
Perhaps he hoped by being present to guide counsels and mitigate 
some features of the stroke, from which everything was to be feared. 
At all events he consented to join the enterprise. There was a 
disused trail, midway, neglected by the scouts sent out south and 
west ; by this they stole around the hills, delayed by bad weather, 
yet undiscovered, till they reached the rear of the settlement after 
daylight on the 11th of November. A notification from Colonel 



THE STOEY OP CHERRY VALLEY 



Gansevoort at Fort Schuyler had told of the meeting of Butler and 
Brant at Tioga and of their starting for Cherry Valley. But the 
pickets were merely dispatched along the usual roads, the feeble 
scouts were captured, the onset had all the advantage of a sur- 
prise, and the incredulous Alden at the Wells house was caught 
before he could reach the fort. They numbered about 800 men, of 
whom 30 were British troops under four officers, 600 Indians, 
principally Senecas under the bitterly cruel Hiokatoo (whose wife 
was widely known as Mary Jamieson), and 150 Tories, many in 
Indian paint and of worse than Indian atrocity. 

The wakeful Mrs. Clyde had dreamed of Indian alarms and of 
warnings from Mollie Brant, and at daylight urged her husband to 
repair to the fort and learn if all were right. He had not time to 
return when a wounded rider came in with the word that the foe 
had overtaken and shot him. The signal gun was fired, a dismal 
rainy morning. Mrs. Clyde being prepared, gathered her family 
and fled to the ravine as the savages emerged from the forest be- 
hind. There were eight children besides an apprentice and a little 
dog. The babe never wailed, the dog did not bark. The rain 
turned to sleet and snow, yet all escaped after a night's exposure 
and terror, a relief party coming out from the fort and all running 
the gauntlet of the enemy's fire in crossing the open ground in front 
of the palisade. A battle raged here for hours, renewed on the 
12th, but the cannon compelled the foe to retire. Colonel Clyde 
was luckily within, and he seems to have assumed the command, or 
it might have been taken, as nearly all its officers were surprised 
at their quarters in the house^of the settlement. 

The Wells house had been the first to be attacked. They were 
at worship when the rifle of a Tory felled the head of the house- 
hold. The whole family were slain, Robert Wells, his wife and 
four children, his mother, brother and sister and three domestics, 
together with the guard of Colonel Alden. Having secured the 
Lieutenant Colonel, Stacy, Brant demanded," Who runs thei^e ?' ' and 
being told, "The colonel," he turned over his prisoner and pursued 
the fugitive, calling on him to surrender. Alden turned to use his 
pistol, but the tomahawk flew and he fell in the roadway. The 
body, dragged to one side, was found on a spot still pointed out just 



THE STORY OF CHERRY VALLEY. 

below the ascent to the Wells house. This is the account given in 
a MS. by Judge George C. Clyde, and the account also related to 
me personally by Mr. George Ripley, both of them grandsons of 
Colonel Clyde ; namely that Colonel Alden was killed by Brant 
himself, but, as he alleged, in self-defence. A pillar of concrete 
with marble tablet erected on this spot marks the occurrence. 

Every foot of the Cherry Valley soil has its tale of the experi- 
ences of that day. Hugh Mitchell avoided the Indians, but gained 
his house to find his wife and four children left for dead, two being 
carried captives. One child showed signs of life, and as he was in 
the act of restoring her the blow of a Tory extinguished the spark ; 
all that was left w^as to load the corpses on a sled, and over the fresh 
fallen snow, bring and lay them with the ghastly rows with which 
the great trench was being fiilled. He recognized his near neigh- 
bour, a Royalist renegade named Newbury, as the man who com- 
mitted this brutal act, and he had the satisfaction, later, of bring- 
ing him to the gallows for his crime. Mitchell lies buried at Cherry 
Valley at the age of 102 years. 

Mrs. Elizabeth Dickson escaped with her children to the hill 
behind the house, but her infant fretting she ventured back for 
milk and did not return. The daughter, Eleanor, peering about, at 
length saw a scalpstick on which, drying, among others waved a 
tress of brilliant aburn of a color such as there was none other in 
the settlement but her mother's. The Campbell home was defended 
•so valiantly by the aged Captain Cannon, the grandfather, a naval 
veteran, that the Indians let him go; but his wife w^as captured, 
and, too feeble to make the journey, was struck down in the snow by 
an Indian the next day, and her body was buried at the fort. It 
may have been this piece of barbarity which led Brant to insist on 
the release of the majority of the women and children. Forty-five 
of these were now permitted to return. The thirty-four carried off, as 
reported in a return by Colonel Harper shortly after, included all 
males captured and the families of prominent persons, and likewise 
some eight or ten negroes. Thirty-three inhabitants were massacred 
and fourteen of the regiment, besides the colonel. Colonel Camp- 
bell was absent at the time ; his wife was captured with her infant 
and other children, except one, William, rescued and carried to the 



THE STORY OF CHERRY VALLEY 

river by a faithful slave. He was afterwards Surveyor General of 
the State. Mrs. Campbell's experience was most harrowing. The 
murdered Mrs. Cannon was her mother. With the little babe in 
her arms she made the bitter journey all the way down the Sus- 
quehanna to Tioga Point, and up the Chemung to the Seneca 
Castle. Here she passed the winter, not ill-treated by the Indians, 
but destitute of sufficient clothing and in deepest anxiety about her 
children's fate as well as of her friends. One day a squaw asked 
her why she wore the linen cap, then the mark of a lady, saying 
she had such a cap, and produced it. Mrs. Campbell recognized it 
as the one worn by her loved friend, Jane Wells! To- 
wards spring the British officers at Fort Niagara, hear- 
ing that there was a lady who was a prisoner at the 
Castle, sent a messenger on horseback with a supply of female 
raiment and provisions for her relief. As soon as the season per- 
mitted she was carried to Fort Niagara and by the officers ransomed 
from the Indians, she returning the kindness by services with her 
needle, until she was sent to Montreal. After nearly two years of 
captivity she was exchanged for a Mrs. Butler and her children. 
In the cartel boat on Lake Champlain she was accompanied by 
several young ladies who had been at school at Montreal and were 
detained by the hostilities till this opportunity of a return, and 
after being fired upon and landed in the wilds of Vermont, owing 
to a false alarm, they all reached their friends in Albany. Two of 
the Campbell boys were lost among the Indians and adopted by 
them. Matthew returned adorned with ornaments of silver and 
diamonds, doubtless rifled from the body of some slain officer. The 
Indians had adopted him as a chief, and treated him with honor. 
The other son, James, six years old, was lost for some three years, 
forgetting his small knowledge of the English speech. Shortly after 
his restoration occurred the tour of General Washington over this 
frontier, who being entertained at Colonel Campbell's house, held 
this interesting child upon his knee. He lived to be ninety-eight, 
when the present writer attended his funeral in 1870. After the 
Civil war he was taken to Albany and shook the hand of General 
Grant. He was the father of the author of the Annals of Tryon 
County, and grandfather of Douglas Campbell who wrote "The 
Puritan in Holland, England and America." 



THE STORY OP CHERRY VALLEY. 

The Massachusetts troops passed the winter in the fort, and in 
June following joined the expedition under General Sullivan at 
Otsego Lake. The fort was dismantled and the church eventually 
burnt, as were practically all the buildings of the place. Four 
years later, on the 18th of April, 1781, a second descent was made 
on the few venturesome people who had returned to Cherry Valley, 
by a band of eighty men, who killed eight persons and took fourteen 
prisoners. Till that year Captain McKean had been as ever active, 
but that summer Colonel Willett with 150 Americans fought a 
battle with from 200 to 300 Indians at Durlagh (Torlock), some 
miles east of Cherry Valley, winning a fine victory, but the brave 
captain was carried off by his men wounded to his death. 

When Mr. Dunlop returned from Albany that Autumn to see to 
his affaire for the winter, together with his wife and daughter 
(unmarried) he was accompanied by his married daughter, Mrs. 
Eleanor Willson, and by a young man to whom Elizabeth expected 
to be married. This young man was killed. Elizabeth passed 
the later years of her life at Bernardsville, N. J., in the home of 
her niece, Mrs. Dr. Boyland, and as "Aunt Whitie" was well 
remembered by her great niece, who died at over ninety, a year 
ago, the mother of Bishop Fitzgerald of the Methodist Episcopal 
Church. The effects saved from Cherry Valley were burnt in a 
fire at Barnardsville, and Mrs. Fitzgerald related that the daugh- 
ter of Mr. Dunlop used to say that her greatest regret in this fire 
was not the household articles so much as the loss of the family 
coat of arms, the mark of their respectable standing. The arms 
of the Dunlops forms an adornment of the tablet set up in the 
Cherry Valley Church. 

Mrs. Dunlop at the moment of the alarm happened to have in 
her arms the child of the negro slave woman. When they said 
the barn was on fire she stepped to the door to look and was shot 
by a bullet from an unseen hand. In the rush that followed some 
unfeeling brute severed the arm that held the child and flung it 
into an apple tree that stood long after nearby. Violence to Mr. 
Dunlop was averted for a moment by the astonishment of the 
Indian who would have scalped him at seeing come off in his hand 
the wig which he wore as a gentlemen of position; when a chief 



THE STORY OF CHERRY VALLEY 

named Little Aaron interposed to save the venerable pastor, 
shocked and prostrated already almost to his death by the awful 
scenes that were to end his peaceful labors. He and his unmarried 
daughter were prisoners, but were soon released and made their 
way with the wretched train of some 200 others that were reported 
by Colonel Clyde as rendered destitute by the calamity. He soon 
died, probably at Schenectady, but where his ashes repose is not 
known. 

His little grandson, John Wells, was the only member of that 
family who survived that day. Mrs. Willson just before the 
massacre besought her sister, Mary Wells, to allow her to take this 
child with her back to Schenectady, where he had shown great 
aptitude in a few weeks' schooling he had enjoyed that summer, 
and she left Cherry Valley with some officers a day or so before 
the attack. He lived to graduate at Princeton and to become the 
most eminent lawyer in New York City. As a young man he co- 
operated with Alexander Hamilton in the publication of the 
"Federalist" newspaper, and some of the pieces in it attributed 
to the older hands were said to be from his pen. At his untimely 
death from yellow fever, in 1832, a bust of his beautiful head was 
placed in old Grace Church, with this inscription: "Erected by 
the Bar of New York as a tribute of their respect for the memory 
of John Wells, who adorned their profession by his integrity, 
eloquence and learning." 

This monument is now one of the most beautiful adornments 
of St. Paul's Chapel in Broadway. 

One of the most vividly lifelike accounts of the experiences and 
privations of those who escaped the hands of the Indians at the 
time of the massacre, as well as a most interesting sketch of the diffi- 
culties and hardships of the immigrants in the period of poverty 
previous to the war, is given from the life of one who survived 
them, in "Jane Ferguson's Narrative," who in extreme age, but in 
a most intelligent manner, dictated the tale of her people's settle- 
ment a few miles west of Cherry Valley, now Springfield, a num- 
ber of years before the war of the Revolution, of their retreat to 
the neighborhood of Schenectady, their starving life through the 
years of strife, and the bitter struggles of the return. It is too 



THE STORY OF CHERRY VALLEY. 

long to be quoted here and would lose its interest in an abridge- 
ment. It was published in the American Histwieal Magazine of the 
D. A. R. 7j.r^^/7:^y 

Immediately upon the close of the war the Cherry Valley peo- 
ple returned to rebuild their homes. The ancient trustee's book of 
the Church bears on its first page, in a hand writing like a piece of 
fine engraving, the quaint record of a gathering at the ruins of 
their sanctuary among the graves of their kindred and hard by 
the trench where the victims of the fatal day were buried. "We 
the ancient inhabitants of Cherry Valley, having returned from 
exile, finding ourselves destitute of our church officers, to wit, elders 
and deacons: — our legislature having enacted a law for the relief 
of those, etc." — they proceeded to appoint a day for the rehabilita- 
tion of their Zion. The rude and simple edifice was built, but it 
was not till 1796, eighteen years after the cessation of Mr. Dunlop's 
labors, that a pastor could be secured in a young man of talent, 
who with the pulpit assumed charge of the Academy, then just 
chartered under the newly founded Regents of the University. A 
marble tablet was erected in the church, in 1904, the gift of a 
grandson of this young divine and teacher, the Right Reverend 
Henry C. Potter, Bishop of New York. It reads as follows: 

The Reverend Eliphalet llott; D. D. LL. D. 

Clarum Et Venerabile Nomen, 

for sixty-one years President of Union College, 

was from 1796 till 1798 

Minister of this Church and in the Academy here 

began his career as 

EDUCATOR. 

There is also in the church a memorial brass to Judge William 
W. Campbell, referred to above as the author of a very early book 
upon the history of this frontier, to which every writer on the sub- 
ject must ever be indebted, "The Annals of Tryon County, or the 
Border Warfare of New York." He is commemorated as "Vir 
bonus, Judex Justus, Institutionum Amicus." 



THE STORY OF CHERRY VALLEY 



The writer acknowledges the help derived at many points from "The Old New 
York Frontier" by Francis W. Halsey, the best treatment of the general subject 
yet written. 

NOTES. 

See Page 5. 

Mr. Roseboom held the responsible position of Cruyt Magassijn Meester, or 
"Powder Master," at Albany continuously from 1771 to 1786, embracing the entire 
period of the war. His "Powder Book" records "June 10, 1777, 100 barrels, loaded 
by order of Mr. Philip van Renselaer, 25 wagons each, 4 bar'l" This ammuni- 
tion was used in the campaign against Burgoyne. The "Receipt Book" of his son. 
Col. Myndert Roseboom, as one of the "Commissioners, Middle District, Albany," 
is full of receipts of moneys for food and supplies gathered for "the poor, dis- 
tressed people" and the "Refugees;" extending from Sept. 16, 1777 to April 2, 1778, 
the time when the pinch of war was sternly felt in the upper Hudson and Mo- 
hawk Valleys. 

See Page 9. 

The famous " Tim" Murphy boasted his record of forty (40) Indians killed 
by his own hand. The following story of him survives at Cherry Valley. On a 
geological shelf or terrace in the hills west of the village, there was a high level 
trail, by following which the savages could pass around unseen, meandering with 
the hills, but keeping above the houses. An Indian passing by on this track and 
seeing Murphy within hail conferring with Clyde and Wells, was tempted to call 
out an insulting challenge and passed on. The marksman knew that he would 
return, lay for him concealed, and shot him as he reached the spot where he had 
uttered the insult. 



See Page 1 1 . 

Halsey. The reason assigned by Col. Johnson for the building of this fort was 
that "the fort at Cherry Valley was too far distant;" implying the existence of 
such a stronghold there at the time of the French War. It would naturally be a 
stockade enclosing the house and premises of Wells himself on the hill, and doubt- 
less included the shelter of the log church which tradition locates on that hill 
near the Wells house. There is no local recollection of such a fort, but at the very 
first there must have been a protection against surprise and treachery such as a 
fortified house. The good terms on which the people at Cherry Valley lived with 
the Indians caused all trace of both these forts to disappear very soon. A body of 
800 men was raised at Canajoharie in the French War and 100 of them were sent 
to Cherry Valley. 

The need of a fort at Oghwaga for the Indians was the direct result of Brad- 
dock's defeat, which threatened to carry the Indians of Pennsylvania and the 
Western New York tribes over to the French, since they seemed to be more powerfu 
than the English. Pontiac's war, in 1763-4, and the resulting disturbance and 
famine, broke up the Mission at Oghwaga, the school being removed to the foot of 
Otsego Lake, where it would be within easy reach at Cherry Valley. 



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